Day 18: Venice

Piazza San Marco
see all photos »

**** A MORE UPDATED VERSION (since our time in the other internet cafe was rushed)

Our first day in Venice and Italy is off to a great start.  We arrived this morning on a night train.  We got here at about 10 a.m.  We had discussed earlier that we wanted to change our reservation for our train going to Florence, so we decided to do that right when we arrived.  To our surprise, the station was on a 24-hour strike.  No changing tickets today!  We found our hotel with ease - - about five minutes from the train station.  We checked in with ease, got that train funk off of us with a nice cool shower and headed on out into the water world known as Venice.  We first headed off towards the most tourist-infested area - Piazza San Marco.  While tourist-infested, we can definitely see the allure of this immense square.  With San Marco Basilica on one side and beautiful restaurants, cafes, shops and other goodies lining the rest of the square, it is definitely an inviting place.  As soon as we got there, we realized that a big touristy thing there was to buy a bag of €1 bags of corn kernels to feed to the pigeons.  Well, for €1, who could resist?  Since Melissa is terrified of birds, the decision was made that TJ would feed the birds while Melissa took pictures.  TJ says he was shocked at how gentle they were considering their scary little talons.  Melissa was quite scared by the birds!  After that, we just strolled around - looking at all the different churches, basilicas, bridges, canals,etc.  TJ tested out all the different pizzas around the city while Melissa took care of the ice cream and gelatto.  For lunch we went to a cute cafe and shared a meatball dish and a penne dish.  Delish we say!  We walked around more and more.  We heard that even with the best of maps, you will inevitably get lost.. and guess what?  We totally did.  We wandered around for what seemed like ever, even wandering into the non-touristy parts of Venice.  It was a nice, hot, summer stroll.  For dinner, we headed for the Rialto bridge to have a nice pasta dinner by the water.  Who can lose all this vacation weight with all this tempting food?!  We did what the Italians do... a smallish plate of pasta for a first course AND we ordered a second course . . . oh yeah!  For our first course, TJ had cannelloni and Melissa had gnocchi in FOUR cheeses!  The pastas were, of course, great.  For our second course, TJ ordered the porkchop and Melissa ordered "Fried Fish".  The waiter yelled a bit at TJ for ordering the porkchop - - he couldn't understand why someone would order only meat in a city full of good seafood.  TJ said - - I want the meat!!  Melissa's fried fish turned out being a plate of fried seafood (shrimp, calamari, fish, and a big ol' giant shrimp) with a side of polenta.  Yum Yum Yum.  To cap off the night, we took a vaporetto (the city's version of buses - they're water boats) back towards the hotel.  To get there, we jumped on the 82 line that started from Piazza San Marco so that we could ride the whole Canal Grande.  It was great!  Sun was setting and everything nice!  Can't wait for our second day in Venice....